Better late than never … I meant to bring up this post before Easter and not a day after, but time is more of a foe than a friend, especially during Holiday season. Anyway, a typical Easter tradition in Poland are the Polish Easter Eggs – known as pisanki. They come in a large variety of sorts and can be self-made or bought from professional “pisanki makers”. Here’s a brief look at the home made version …

The most typical Polish easter egg is actually “painted” with onion peels. Yes, really. It’s actually really simple – one needs to have quite a few onion peels (generally, you’d be collecting them for a few weeks before Easter so you have enough), a pot with water and eggs. You put as many onion peels into your pot, put in the eggs and boil it for about 15 – 30 minutes. After that, you need to leave the eggs in that onion water for at least a few hours.

Cooking Polish Easter eggs in onion peels – (C) blogofpoland.com

The result? Brown eggs. You can see it in the picture below. To make them look better, you can polish them with some butter – they will be more shiny. The dark colour of those Polish easter eggs combines great with the white and light green colours of many Easter decor, especially the basket in which the food (including the easter eggs) is brought to church. You can read upon that a little bit here.

Another great thing about onion-coloured Polish Easter eggs is that you can scribble on them with a small knife or some other sharp object. This way, you can draw whatever you like on your egg, and the results are spectacular. I’m not much of an artist, so I wouldn’t even try but you can see some great results here.

Polish Easter eggs dyes in onion peels

Apart from the onions, we’d use also more modern ways of getting Polish Easter eggs. In particular, one can dye the eggs in special “egg dye” which can be bought in any store prior to Easter, and it’s a bargain. You get all veriety of colours, and the results are not bad. What’s important to rememeber – when you dye an egg, be sure to add a spoon of vinegar to to coloured water. Vinegar makes the original egg color more white and it helps the dye to stick to the egg.

Again, you can polish the eggs with some butter to make them more shiny (but not too much – they’re not supposed to be greasy, just nicely polished). And then the last part starts – decorating them. At home, this would be done by the kids. Depending on their age, the decoration would be more or less professional (with less being the main keyword here), but it’s still pretty.